Gundam Wing: Fight Club
by Kaitsurinu
Summary: Teaser. AU 2x1x2 3x4 While living on fighting money and dodging murder attempts, a vicious American fighter appears to Heero Yuy from across the ocean.


Disclaimer: blah, blah blah, pluze don't sue me. I con't spel.   
  
Note: This is only a teaser, I"m still working on my other two stories in progress, it's just that things are going kinda slow with me being a big perfectionist and all, and I've had this sitting around doing nothing for a while, so I thought it'd be a little Christmas gift to tide people over in horibble exciuating cliff-hanger style. I'm soooo nice! Ha. yeah right. I'll finish this one after I've finished Basket Case, I think.   
  
Warnings: Slightly OOC/smartass Heero, language, hinted violence  
  
  
  
Chapter 1  
"Strychnine Tea"  
  
  
Monday night. Tuesday night. Wednesday night. Thursday night. Friday night.  
  
The constrictive workweek was a colorless, tasteless lump Heero Yuy repeatedly swallowed, willingly and with a stoically sick expression. It was a long drawn-out game of industrial cat and mouse, with humanity the mouse and humanity's self-inflicted, impossible standards the happily fed cat. Drive. Park. Walk. Work. Drive. Park. Fight with wife. Sleep. Repeat as needed. He couldn't stand it. Their dumbfounded, numbed single mindedness drove him insane inside his head. He himself admitted to having a single mindedness, but he did so with a sharp mind, not with one of a cow. It was so passive, so willing, so wanting to just be crushed under a new military force and be flattened into another stupor of submission. It was a rug waiting for a new hand to beat it clean into a stupid drooling happiness, this jaded America. It'd broken off from its mother country so long ago, and now seemed like it had lost its legs somewhere on the road of leaving Britain and just laid down and stared at the clouds until it was sick of that. It was dull here. It was dying in spirits. It was too tired to form on itself, so it conformed to anything that came its way. He couldn't remember why he'd moved here.  
  
He at least had the politeness to suck it in, a habit his drill sergeants had forced into him, and keep silent when he came home. In his modest residence, silence was golden and it seemed like a sanctuary for people who couldn't find any in this southern Californian town.  
  
Trowa definitely wouldn't listen to any of his criticisms on the lack of American character here, just stare down at his newspaper and read them instead. It was no use to beat the words into him. It would only lead to a brief, sarcastic remark later on where it wasn't needed just out of spite, probably in front of the landlord Catherine chiding Heero about how he only paid seven percent of the rent that month, or in front the local streetwalker Relena on how poor hormone-ridden Heero was secretly complaining of so many wet dreams.   
  
That bastard enjoyed it, behind that fledgling of a smile. The irony of it was Trowa always embarrassed him in front of women. He enjoyed it so much, especially when he didn't have to deal with a very unhappy Heero. Instead he could call Quatre up out of the blue and make dinner plans and be gone for the night and leave him to fume over. He didn't have to deal with women.   
  
Sifting through the usual Friday night congestion of greasy seniors cavorting the streets and stiffly pressed suited business, the dark-haired Japanese young man seemed to melt and reappear amongst the crowds. The lights were muddled and dank and garish around him, a nauseous yellow and slimy orange. The colors matched the mood, he thought negatively. He grunted suddenly as an elbow caught him in the ribs and he jerked back. He narrowed his eyebrows, focusing on the oblivious and hurried face of a spidery man hurrying back to his home, no doubt. For a second, he felt a suppressed part of him want to strike back or elbow him back at least. Heero trudged along without retaliation, keeping his black duffle back pressed to the back of his knees as he wormed through sideways, careful of the precious, so precious, contents inside that he based his life around. The street swarmed with life, swirled with insignificant conversations and scuffles that were forgotten two seconds afterward. Heero didn't consider himself part of this mixing pot, nor above it. Just… different.  
  
'No one following... No one,' Heero reassured himself, sensing the schizophrenic fear welling up in a deep, dark, repressed niche of himself.  
  
Wary Prussian eyes trained on the glowing neon sign up ahead, advertising brazenly and uselessly the tenement he lived in, hopeful for business. Wiping the humidity off his brow, he proceeded to choke off from the crowds massing the sidewalks towards the door. He jerked violently away from them, who were pressing on like mechanical maniacs to wherever they were going. With a growl, Heero felt recoil on his hands, as his black duffle bag was wedged in the fray and continued on down the sidewalk separate of him. With a furrow between both eyebrows, he lunged at it again, not totally disconnected from it. An index finger managed to stay hooked around the strap. With a grunt and receiving many angry looks, he jerked it back out and tightly into his possession, shooting down any eyes he met with death glares. He clung to that sewing of cloth and thread like his very beating heart, his last possession in the world. Stepping up onto the tenement step, Heero punched his finger into the speaker button number 83 and waited for the static to clear and to receive a link to his room. Hopefully, his roommate wasn't out flirting with his fiancé again.  
  
Impatiently, he tapped his finger on the metal. The speaker hissed at him sharply and then tapered off into silence. "Hello?" A melodious male voice. "Go away."  
  
"Nice to see you too, Trowa," Heero said flatly, leaning in briefly. "Can I come up?"  
  
The static hissed intermittently as Trowa's fingers seemed to slip on and off the button in decision. Heero sighed to himself while Trowa couldn't hear him along with a roll of his eyes. Quat. He had nothing against the admittedly striking blonde boy, but the infatuation between the two was so intense and complete and encompassing that a quiet, stoic little roommate like him could get sucked in like manatee into a boat motor. He didn't need to feel the sappy warmness they emanated in waves but he did nonetheless. He couldn't become jealous, no. It'd make his life a little pathetic, whining, sniveling hellhole that reminded him regularly that every girl he'd been with had quit because of failure to de-ice him.  
  
"—Come on, Trowa. I haven't talked to him for ages!"  
  
"Quatre, it's on."  
  
"Oh!"  
  
The background noise was of the Latin boy's rare and melodic laughter. Heero wanted to laugh, but it never even made it to his mouth. "Konnichiwa, Quatre," he recited impassively.   
  
"Masa'a alkair, Heero," he replied, repeating his part of their warm but mechanic script. "How are you doing? How are you healing?"  
  
"Fine. Thanks for asking." Monotone, but not abrasive. "Second anniversary, ni?"  
  
"Yeah! — How'd you know?"  
  
"How could I not know? Could you put Trowa back on for a second? I've got to talk to him, please."  
  
"No problem," the blonde said good-naturedly, and the static peaked briefly as the button was released then punched again as his roommate returned to the communication link.   
  
"Listen, Heero, I'm sorry. I forgot—"   
  
"Shut up, please, Trowa. I'd like to be inside right now," he comment briskly, battle-hardened blue eyes flickering over the ragged and groomed tops of the Californians bustling past the tenement door, where he was shadowed. For his roommate, the casual manners were dropped instantly like water off glass and were replaced with calculating dark tones of secrets and experience. 'No one...yet.'   
  
"Conversation inside," Heero asserted. "Bad day."  
  
"Not…"  
  
"Inside, Barton— Only inside. You should know that."  
  
"Of course, Yuy," he returned with the slightest trace of something besides monotony.  
  
The lean, tanned figure with an Asian tinge removed his finger from the panel on the inside of the grimy brick wall and again scanned the face of the anonymous people, bringing an expression unreadable to his face. Gripping his black duffle bag loaded down with fabric weight, he swung it behind him absently and unenergetically observed the buzz as the door was unlocked and stepped in side, cutting off the rest of the choking, thick, humid world from himself and the drafty stairway that awaited him. Heero climbed.  
  
  
  
---  
  
  
  
In the sick wash of a motel light, a body paced from door to window in a brooding fashion, like a ghost passing from shadow to shadow in a hurry to find something—anything—to clamp its nonexistence to. It belonged to a young man of nineteen years, violet-eyed, American-faced, and bull-spirited. Ungodly luxurious brown hair clouded over his forehead in the form of sharp, highly pronounced bangs and continued on down to the small of his back braided tightly into something straight out of a magazine or textbook or museum of hairstyles. City lights caught eerily in his blank expression as he turned to the open window of black marble, dotted with the distant freckles of color. Gripping the wood and leaning forward, it only served to fortify his thoughts directly on what he was waiting for. As much as he wanted to be distracted by the cars honking and twitching by, he couldn't be. His mind wavered on and could only exist in one thought—  
  
Riiiing.  
  
He veritably pounced on the phone, ripping the mouthpiece from its socket, not caring it was so primitive. As long as noises came out of it, he had no problem with it. "Hello? Hello?" he gasped from his outburst of speed across the motel room that probably woke up the people below him. "Hello?" he repeated, invoking the familiarity of the mundane code-greetings.  
  
"Shinigami?"  
  
"Nataku?"  
  
"Nice ride in, I presume, if you're not yelling at me for being late," the sinuous voice from the other end of the line commented, overpowering the subtle background noises of a bustling Oriental market place that sifted through. That voice was unreadable again, stone-faced without visual. That bastard!  
  
The boy in the motel huffed. "Enough goddamn small talk! What happened, Wufei?"  
  
"Duo..." The icy tone imparting through the cold, impersonal speaker pits seemed to wrap around his heart and rip a few arteries from their sockets. He curled his suddenly sweaty fingers around the phone until he was sure he'd snapped in two or something. There was no conversation between the two, they both felt like it wasn't needed it anymore. The silence spoke all the words of pain in the world that there were, all frighteningly loud in the brown-haired boy's ears and mind and consciousness. Screaming.   
  
"Duo… I'm sorry."  
  
Violet eyes were wide with shock, horror, and ache, contorting the handsome young face into a peach-colored Picasso. From somewhere in his shock and dismantled world, the boy in the motel could feel the receiver escape from his hand and crash into his knee then deflect into the bedside table and knock a few mints and business cards off it. From the swinging receiver, the silence thickened, as the boy in the Orient was silent as well, uncomfortably trying not to listen to the voicing of pain from the motel in California. Duo, his long plait of hair becoming the victim of his rage, curled up on the bed and screeched holes into the wall, pulling his hair and trying to hold back his tears with a contorted face of punctured, bleeding rage. But it didn't work.  
  
"No!" He screeched, ignoring the fact of paper-thin walls surrounding him, and preceded to liberate the plaster from the wall with the outlook of a red-eyed male cow.  
  
  
  
---  
  
  
  
"I'm sorry I had to disturb you," Heero said flatly, his voice on the plain between apologetic and abrasive. The darkness he'd triggered in the impersonal confines of the sterile white guestroom of his and Trowa's apartment thankfully hid his expression, otherwise his comrade would have notice the ominous frown on his face.   
  
Tiny black dashes resembling miniature tire squelches scarred the walls, products of the furious, testosterone-driven, feeding-frenzy practice sessions in pitch black when bodies would go flying loudly against walls. Blood pooled like disturbing punch stains around the white carpet, something that had been brushed off as quickly as a fly on a shoulder. It was normal, in such an animal-eyed, paranoid world of senseless, blurring montages and secretive lips that ended in disorientation on a sweaty ring floor. Their world. In some sick way, even, a glow of pride came to Heero's face whenever he watched himself bleed on his floor, usually at the mercy of his own best friend's boot. His blood, his pain, trying to run, but in the end only drying into the carpet, immortalized, incarnated. It couldn't escape; he couldn't. It was almost laughable in its hopelessness.  
  
"You'd better be," the cinnamon-haired Latin grumbled, routinely glancing out the door then shutting it noiselessly. "The first one, Heero, the first one to make it two years, damn it. The only one."  
  
"I said I was sorry." The rustle of a duffle bag unzipping pierced the stoic silence from the right side of the bloody practice room.  
  
Emerald green eyes were suddenly only inches from his face, piercing needles into his high cheekbones and threatening poison into his skin and into his veins just by his glare. Heero jerked only slightly, his nerves too frazzled to feel much. His friend's eyes caught only a sliver of light from the orange and blue and red and white orbs of the city outside the fourth story and looked like two furious green marbles drilling down on him. His half-panting breath clouded on his temple and Heero shivered in a little bit of fear.   
  
"Quatre is not part of this," he hissed.  
  
Heero's pale pink lips curled. "You haven't told him yet?"  
  
"Never."  
  
The Japanese boy stared straight ahead, at the slate of blackness, and replied softly, "I can't guarantee anything, Trowa, and you know that. Come New Year's Eve, your pretty blonde is just as likely to be pushing up daisies as any of us." He titled his head absently toward the window, dark chocolate bangs hiding his blue eyes. "In fact, he's got a curse to outrun."  
  
Trowa stared with near fury at the side of his friend's face as it turned toward him.  
  
"Third time's a charm," Heero said, a thick, invisible poison of sarcasm embedded in his tone.  
  
Suddenly, a pain shot up the shorter boy's arm and his own anger pierced through his stoic slate. Heero tried thrash out of a vice grip on his shoulder, but Trowa was taller and had the advantage of being the Japanese boy's trainer. More pain shot up his skin as his long callused fingers dug in deeper.   
  
"I will not lose him like Midi and Rayne. Quatre is not part of this," he repeated point-blank. "You mention him once in the wrong place…"  
  
"And you kill me. Of course."  
  
The odd-banged brunette stepped away from Heero, sensing his comrade's tolerance ebbing short. "Absolutely. Now, what's wrong?" He folded his arms and leaned back against the wall, completely shadowed from sight. "What did you manage to fuck up this time?"  
  
"Everything," he said.  
  
Trowa gave an intelligent "Shit" under his breath.  
  
"I injured one of the Peacecraft fight dogs," Heero confessed, turning away from Trowa to stare impassively down at the blood-clotted carpet. "Dislocated her pretty shoulder."  
  
The Latin's green eyes shot open as if he'd been stabbed with a syringe of adrenaline and fear. His lips hinged open and shut mechanically, unable to latch onto the words hard enough to force them out. Trowa shook his head and gathered himself. "What the hell were you doing in a bout with a fight dog?—Especially a Peacecraft fight dog! Flirting?"  
  
Heero's seething Prussian eyes trained on him. "I was… forced," he stated.  
  
"No one's strong enough to force you."  
  
"Well, this person was," he said faintly. "Cash wise."  
  
Trowa snorted in a flat tone. "I'm glad you were paid for fucking up."  
  
The Japanese boy suddenly stopped rummaging in his black bag, pausing for a second, then returned to it with a passion and produced a shapeless lump in the black. It flew into Trowa's hand, fresh paper scent infecting the air. Unwrapping the white paper bag first, he exposed 20 large bundles of crisp, illegal money. His green eyes widened.   
  
"That's enough to buy Blondie a house, so you too can live happily ever after. Well, for the length of the down payment, at least," Heero said.   
  
"You won," Trowa said quietly, paging through the high nominations, greeted with wave upon wave of green gold. Blood money. He was so stunned at the burst of slaving kindness from his seemingly heartless roommate that he couldn't even thank him.  
  
"The fight yes; the war no." The Japanese boy lifted his loose black shirtsleeve to reveal a nasty bullet graze, hastily tacked over with crude medial supplies, face cold of emotion. Blood had soaked through the first two layers and dried on his skin where it had leaked, his muscles straining in pain just to move his shoulder. "Milliardo believed I cheated. When I said he couldn't prove it, he had a temper flare." Heero's eyes dropped as he continued. "He shot the girl like she was a lame horse, that bastard."  
  
"He'll come for his money," Trowa said, green eyes shadowed.  
  
"I know," Heero said impassively, slipping off his casual black T-shirt and changing into his loose green tank top. "I'll be ready for him."  
  
The Latin's expression softened into weary pity, trained blurrily on the outline of the Asian's face in the blackness. He stared at him with the eyes of a teacher, of a criminal, of a future husband, and all could see only a jaded fighter, an old alpha wolf ready to embrace death from the younger dog, of a jaded human being veiled behind battered flesh and anesthetized emotions. He sighed, leaning against the streaked wall, and brought a hand up to his temple, cradling his elbow on his other arm. "What will you do?" he asked, gaze directed at the floor.  
  
"The only thing I can. Go where I'll be ready for him." Heero shouldered his black bag, now completely changed into his fighting attire.   
  
"Fine." Trowa waved it off distantly. "If you make it back, there's morphine and icepacks in the freezer."  
  
"Thank you," Heero said softly, watching as the lean boy began to leave for the second door out of the bloodstained practice room, one that led to the kitchen. "Trowa?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"How far away does Blondie live?"  
  
This caught the Trowa's attention, and he turned questioning green eyes back to meet Prussian. "Why?"  
  
"I think you should walk him home before he's number three."  
  



End file.
